Exemplar’s HR team celebrates success in away day

Four months ago, Exemplar’s HR team held its first away day to ask a question:

How can Exemplar make sure our 2,700 colleagues live, breathe and bring our values to life?

Last week, Exemplar’s Human Resources team held a second away day to celebrate its success in finding the answers.

Exemplar has five values, summed up in the acronym FIRST: Fun, Integrity, Responsive, Success, and Team work.

On the away day, HR colleagues split into groups to make posters celebrating our teams’ successes.

The recruitment team’s poster celebrated key progress made, such as streamlining the process of getting new joiners through to their inductions, and better in-team communication.

The employee relations team’s poster illustrated how the team had made progress on taking ownership, collaboration, and empowerment. The training and development’s poster celebrated how it had become a more cohesive team and had achieved its goals.

Taking the time

“As Exemplar keeps growing and opens more specialist care homes, it’s important that we take time to celebrate our success, examine how we’re living out our values today, and how we’ll build on them moving forward,” said Claire Fretwell, Exemplar’s Head of Learning, Development & Talent.

“The day was also a great opportunity for teams to get to know each other better, and live out our all-important value of fun!” said Andrea Stoddart, Exemplar’s HR Manager.

The team, led by Claire Fretwell, shared the insights discovery tools on how to build a high performing team, and carried out exercises to look to the future and build upon an already successful start on the ‘Our People Plan’ journey.

During the day, Lynne Waters, the HR Director, alongside HR managers, talked about progress that had been made on the Exemplar People Plan – the company’s strategy for every element of people management and leadership, which sets out our future strategic direction.

At the heart

The six-part People Plan ensures that Exemplar’s people are at the heart of everything we do, and helps show how colleagues can be supported through every stage of their working lives.

The plan’s six parts are: colleague communication and engagement; recruitment and talent management; health, wellbeing and community; learning and development; organisation structure and culture, and HR consistency and metrics.